Why has it been more than 30 years since humankind has returned to the moon?

Question

People spend so much time arguing about everything from politics to religion. Why can't we focus our collective energies and actually accomplish something worth while, that could actually unite us as a world?

Answer 1

That is a great question which I think requires a little background in the history of the Apollo program to understand.

The decision to go the moon was made not only for reasons of exploration and scientific research, but also because the USSR and the US were rivals in the area of space exploration. It is hard for those who have grown up after the demise of the Soviet Union to understand the intensity of competition between the two countries, it could actually be perceived as a competition between two sociopolitcal systems, free enterprise capitalism and socialism. Early on the Russians were more advanced in space exploration and the US, under the leadership and vision of President John Kennedy, established a focused objective to beat the Russians to the moon.

But to say we only went to the moon to get there first is a gross oversimplificaton. The early 1960s were a period of optimism and self confidence in the ability of American technology to overcome any obstacle. But things began to change as the program went along. For one thing, President Kennedy was assisinated in 1963 and his leadership was sorely missed. On the other hand many saw the success of the lunar program as a monument to Kennedy's vision and the helped move it along.

In my opinion, the Viet Nam was and the turmoil it created in the country, the divisiveness it engendered, brought about a huge change in our national priorities. By the time the moon landings took place beginning in 1969, the national spirit was waning. Of course the first landing was a monumental event around the world, the greatest scientific and technical achievement in history in my opinion. But after the first few landings it became old hat. The progam was cut back primarily because the war had caused a huge decifit and funding was cut. Also the Watergate scandal took place not long after Apollo was completed and that only added to the turmoil and lack of confidence.

Once the momentum was gone it was very hard to get it going again. The decision was made to concentrate on a reuseable spacecraft which became the shuttle. But again because of budget issues the shuttle was not given the ability to acheive anything but near earth orbit so we have been stuck close to home all this time.

In my opinion sole reliance on the shuttle concept was a mistake, it seemed like a good idea but was way over engineered. The shuttle is the most complicated machine ever built. It is interesting that we went to moon 7 times with "primative" technology and never lost an astronaut, but we have had 2 shuttles lost. I think we should have not placed all our eggs in one basket!

We could have had a colony on Mars by now, but as a nation we lost the will to move forward. The whole universe should be our home, maybe now we are moving in the right direction.

Answer 2

Although the Apollo landings ended with #17, originally it was planned to carry through to at least #21. However, the increasing cost of the Viet Nam war took the funding away from NASA. No further Saturn 5 rockets were built, the only ones capable of sending a manned spacecraft to the Moon and back. Since then no rockets have been built capable of sending a crew to the Moon and returning them. The Shuttle, for example, is not intended to fly above 600 miles. The Ares and Constellation programs, now under development, may permit a return to the Moon by the USA. Even if the USA does not go there again, China (the People's Republic of China, not Taiwan) has announced plans for manned landings starting in 2020, and it is possible the European Union, Russia or India might send crews there. So the Moon will eventually have a permanent human base, although right now we can't predict which country will be first to build one.

Answer 3

Because we still have not found anything as interesting as war. It is sad. With respect to the space race, by the way, once we soundly defeated the Soviets, proving it again and again, we did not bother to return to the Moon, because low Earth orbit satellites were so much more important for military, weather, erosion control, tracking forest fires, etc. We’ll go back there. We’ll have to. The Chinese have already stated their intent to go to the Moon, and they have never made a secret of their goals to have more space to live in. They will try to establish a Celestial Empire, unless we are there to keep an eye on (compete with) them. They never signed the treaties regarding use of nuclear energy and or weapons in space, IIRC.

5 JAN 07, 0138 hrs, GMT

Answer 4

The American and the Russians were in a race - thats where the space race phrase comes from. 2. it was shortly after the cold war and each country wanted to "show off " their capabilitys. After america won they had to keep going until something went wrong - Apollo 13 (typical Americans) though I do like the Americans. Also it costs 40 billions dollars to put a man on the moon some saw it as a huge waste of money and it caused alot of pollution and contributed to global warming.

Answer 5

Why is it worthwhile to go to the Moon, of all things? Who needs it? It's a big rock in the sky. We visited it a few times, looked around, saw what we could see, and realized there wasn't much of interest up there.

As far as we know, there's no gold, silver, diamonds, pearls, just a bunch of Moon rocks, which we now have a bunch of on Earth. Do you want to go collect more Moon rocks?

Why don't we all unite and spend a few billion dollars on feeding the poor instead of on visiting yet again the most desolate place humans have ever been and collecting more useless rocks?

Answer 6

cost vs benefit. It's costly to go there, and there hasn't really been any benefit to doing it for the past 30 years. With upcoming proposed manned MARS missions, a moon base would be an ideal staging location for supplies, plus good for refining methods of extra-planetary travel; so now it makes more sense.

Answer 7

Something which had never happen before could make every country in the world join together to know more of it or to solve it if it was a problem concerning most contry of the world.This thing could be....

Answer 8

Because there really is nothing new we can learn from going there again, and it is a terrilbly expensive project. I would settle for start looking for ways to stop a large asteroid from hitting earth if we are going to upgrade the space program. Not as sexy until one of those things hit, then you will wish you had.

Answer 9

Who says we haven't been back?